Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
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The story of The Fall of Man, the gorilla narrator tells us, began “[l]ong ago,” when, through a “deplorable freak of nature,” one male gorilla was born deformed, almost entirely without hair. But the gorilla was not shunned; rather, many of the young female gorillas, showing the “unaccountable caprice of their sex,” developed “a hankering after this young fellow.” He declared himself “not a marrying gorilla” and announced to his crowd of yearning females that “until he found one whose coat was even softer and slighter than his own, he [w]ould remain a bachelor.”29 A particularly lovesick female gorilla grew determined to win his favor. Day and night, she fretted over how to rid herself of her “disgusting coat of coarse hair.”30
One fateful day the lonely, lovesick gorilla sat down against a tree to muse on her problems, without realizing that the tree was coated with thick, half-dried gum. While she sat there pining, “[t]he hair on the outside of her arm [became] imbedded in the gum, which, drying as she leaned, held her fast.”31 As there were no other gorillas nearby to help free her, the young female decided that she had no option other than to rip herself free: “Summoning all her fortitude and her force, she threw herself forward and fell upon the ground with a scream that might have been heard afar off, for she had torn out by the roots every hair that had touched the tree.”32 Once her pain passed, the gorilla worried that she might now be even more repulsive to the object of her affection, given the raw, bare patch on her arm. But before long, the gorilla narrator continues,
Figure 3.1. Richard Grant White satirizes Darwin’s explanation of the relative hairlessness of “man” (1871).
[S]he was led from despair to hope by a strange way of thinking which man calls reason. . . . [S]he thought that if the object of her love longed for a female with a coat softer and finer and sparser than his own, he might, . . . therefore (but who of us can tell what therefore means?), possibly like one better yet who had no hairy coat at all.33
THUS SHE BEGAN. She remained hidden in seclusion as she returned to the gum tree week after week, until she had denuded her entire body with this “new depilatory.” When her “sacrificial transformation” was finally complete and she revealed herself to the male gorilla, he was totally enamored by the smooth limbs that “all unknown to him, had suffered such torment for his delight.”34 She continued her self-treatments with the gum tree, and also continued to conceal the “artifice [to which] she owed her hairless skin.”35 When she later gave birth to a relatively hairless boy, the narrative concludes, the baby “inherited from his mother those strange thoughts, ‘therefore’ and ‘I am ashamed.’”36
The Fall of Man made comically explicit what Darwin, Wallace, and Stebbing left implicit: stories about body hair reveal larger assumptions about suffering, choice, and what ultimately separates “man” from other animals. Whether a “superior intelligence” plucked the hair from savage men to drive them to tailoring and brick-laying, or whether some early ape determined the course of this “sacrificial transformation,” explications of humans’ relative hairlessness conveyed implicit social values.
AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS, WELL aware of the profound implications of Darwin’s ideas, largely ignored or outright rejected the claims made in Descent through much of the century. But already by the mid-1870s, American botanists, geologists, and ethnologists were adopting evolutionary frameworks and applying them to their work. Coinciding with sociologists’ interest in the historical implications of competitive forces, Darwinian ideas were absorbed into American thought more broadly.37
The influence of evolutionary vocabularies is manifest in post-Descent representations of extraordinarily hairy people, many of whom were displayed in nineteenth-century circuses and freak shows as “dog-faced men” or “bearded ladies.”38 The celebrated midcentury performer Julia Pastrana provides a case in point (figure 3.2). Prior to the Civil War, exhibition handbills characterized the famously hairy Pastrana as a “hybrid” of woman and “Ourang-Outang,” a member of a “race of savages” from Mexico, or the offspring of an Indian and a bear. Said to possess exquisite moral and temperamental faculties, Pastrana allegedly represented that point “where man’s bestial attributes terminate and . . . those that are Divine begin.”39 Yet after Darwin expressed interest in Pastrana in his 1868 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (describing her as a “remarkably fine woman” with a “gorilla-like appearance”), she and other similarly hairy individuals were renarrated as “splendid illustration[s] of Mr. Darwin’s theory.”40 A photograph of a thirteen-year-old girl in Vienna with “skin more like a fur than anything else,” one weekly concluded, might be used to illustrate new editions of Darwin’s work.41 The girl noted earlier, Krao, similarly was exhibited as a “living specimen” of the ancestral ties between men and monkeys.42 Discussing the case of a “dog-faced boy,” one physician noted that he had cause to doubt whether such patients were “member[s] of the human family.”43
Figure 3.2. An undated depiction of the mid-nineteenth-century performer Julia Pastrana, reproduced in The Living Races of Mankind (1900).
Evolutionary understandings of body hair were not limited to the exceptionally hairy people discussed and displayed as “freaks.” Along with a plethora of popular cartoons conveying Darwin’s ideas (or Darwin himself [figure 3.3]) through images of hairy monkeys, more mundane representations of hair also began to reflect evolutionary frameworks.44 Our “hairs,” reported one popular weekly in 1873, “are appendages of the skin, contributing to its defence,” their thickness “regulated by the law of Nature.” Hair is no “less useful because it is ornamental.”45 Hair’s status as an artifact of selective pressures was also affirmed by allusions to the similarities between man and beast; in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the once-controversial claim that “hoofs and hair are homologous appendages” became largely taken for granted.46 The term “well-groomed,” for instance, first coined in 1886, referred evenly well to horse or man.
Figure 3.3. A popular post-Descent caricature of Darwin as a “Venerable Orangoutang,” first published in the satirical magazine the Hornet (1871).
AS EVOLUTIONARY IDEAS about hair seeped into everyday conversation, scientific and medical experts grew more concerned with what became known as “excessive” hair growth. Aesthetic concerns were transmuted into questions of evolutionary fitness. In 1878, seven years after the publication of Descent and one year after the first meeting of the newly formed American Dermatological Association, a Danish physician proposed a new disease category for the individual, “homo hirsutus,” said to suffer from excessive hair: hypertrichosis.47 Subsequent practitioners began to diagnose disease when hair was found to be abnormal in location, quantity, or quality. As one physician working on the subject succinctly stated, “hypertrichosis is defined as an unnatural growth of hair.”48
But which hair, exactly, was to be considered unnatural? Predictably, the new diagnostic category produced a recurrent dilemma for clinical practice: distinguishing pathological levels of hairiness from ordinary hair growth. As with nymphomania (excessive sexual desire), alcoholism (excessive drunkenness), and other diseases first labeled in the nineteenth century, the criteria used to diagnose hypertrichosis were flexible and contested.49 Experts disagreed, for instance, on how to demarcate the soft downy hairs known as lanugo (widely considered “normal”) from the “strong,” dark growths thought to be indicative of disease; in the words of one physician,